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May 07, 2015

Ditching the overdraft and gaining £20

Just a quickie post to tell you all that I did a big grown up thing today. I closed an old RBS current account that had a £1700 overdraft facility on it.

I've had this account since 1996, and over the years as a PhD student built up a debt in it. I finally paid all of that off a few years ago, and switched to a new and better current account, but couldn't bring myself to part with it because of the large overdraft facility. I kept rationalising that it might be needed one day, but realised this morning that our savings account is supposed to be for emergencies. If such a terrible thing happened that we would need more money that we have in cash, we have around £18500 of credit on our credit cards that could be used. I cannot imagine what that would be though. I know we could cover a replacement boiler, car, computer, fencing, and even a redundancy for about six months (although that last one would be a bit tight) if we liberated all of our easy access cash stores.

So, I hopped on a bus this morning, went to the branch to shut it down. What I hadn't realised is that there was a balance of £19.75 still in the current account, and a savings account with the princely sum of 25p in it. I liberated them both and bought some groceries this morning.

I've been doing a bit of a spring clean on all of our financial accounts over the last few days, and have earmarked a spare Barclaycard that needs to go too. I have just realised it has £17 on it - presumably I overpaid at some point and am now carrying a positive balance - so this afternoon I am ringing to close that one and get the money back. Again, as it has no balance on it I don't look at it from one month to the next, so there is no reason for me to have it any more.

Next on my list is old ISAs and savings accounts...I know there are three floating around with nothing more than a few pounds in them earning no interest so they will be liberated too. That's going to take some digging though, as it has been years since I've seen any correspondence on them.